Ronnie Vannucci in this month's Rhythm

Five things you can learn about The Killers Ronnie Vannucci in this month's Rhythm

Five things you can learn about The Killers Ronnie Vannucci in this month's Rhythm:

He and the band wanted to get back to basics on album Number Four

"We were going through a lot of different ideas and a lot of different feels and directions, and it always felt the most comfortable to get back to basics, which was guitar, bass, drums and keyboards. And when we wrote the song 'Runaways', it was that song that laid a bit of the groundwork and provided a little bit of a template to what we wanted to do, what we felt was the most natural."

Drums are 'the last thing he thinks about'!

"I like melody and I think drums and the vocals share an important relationship and I like to kind of riff off each other. For me drums are the lastthing I think about even with The Killers stuff, maybe it's a bad thing but I'm focussed on all the other instruments first."

He's still at school…

"I'm still going actually [to the University of Nevada, Percussion Studies], I'm doing my graduate degree now. It's good, it's in composition so it's nice, again it feels better to me when you're able to have more of a birds-eye view of the situation – at the end of the day it makes me a better drummer."

He's a showman at heart…

"I'm just naturally a show-off! But I think when you're writing songs, in that mindset that's what I'm thinking about. I'm not thinking can I do a flam five or a six-stroke tap here or wow them with my prowess."

He overdubbed the hi-hats on The Killers' 2006 album Sam's Town with his voice:

"On Sam's Town on almost every song I'd overdub the hi-hat part with my voice just going, 'Tchik-tchik-tchik- tchik-tchik-tchik-tchik- tchee-ik' [Ronnie voices a 16th-note hi-hat pattern] and I was like, 'How can I catch that live. So I brought out some bigger cymbals and put them on the hi-hats and bingo!"